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[MadScientist]

The Mars surface that was displayed on top of the real environment so that you were still aware of it? Yes, that is AR. As I understand it, the device is unable to completely block your view of reality. If it can, then it becomes a VR device. I'm just questioning the need for this 'MR' term.

Also this thing won't have the viewing angles necessary for VR.

 

[Ferrio]

This device won't just be for gaming. It will be for computing in general.

Right, but Minecraft is a great trojan horse.

 

[DopeyFish]

This device won't just be for gaming. It will be for computing in general.

depending on the res of the display... being able to set a TV screen size is going to be amazing

i just hope there's going to be some sort of legacy app support in there... somehow....

 

[DrkSage]

I can see this being a perfect efficient idea for everything, but I really can't see this being big in the gaming side.

 

[Spasm]

Right, but Minecraft is a great trojan horse.

The ridiculously priced Mojang acquisition is starting to make a little more sense.

 

[Unicorn]

Can I use it sitting down?

 

[DopeyFish]

Can I use it sitting down?

yes

 

[ChosenPredator]

Finally i can play holoStarwars chess

 

[chadskin]

What it all comes down to to be successful ultimately is price. With all its components (CPU, GPU, HPU, sensors, camera) the HoloLens will probably easily cost >$500 as every calculation is done by the device itself. OculusVR/Morpheus on the other hand are basically just a large screen and a bunch of glasses while all the calculations are done by the console/PC (or the mobile phone).

This feels really more like a proof of concept that's still a couple of years out from being released. Also, what kind of battery life can we expect? 1 hour? 2 hours?

 

[justsomeguy]

Stolen from the win10 thread:

Tom Warren ‏@tomwarren 2m2 minutes ago
I just locked my phone, laptop, and everything into a locker and experienced Microsoft HoloLens. Holy shit.

 

[Anton Sugar]

This device won't just be for gaming. It will be for computing in general.

This. I mean, any sort of engineering job, where you regularly build and design prototypes, could greatly benefit from this.

For interior design, you could use something like the Google Sketchup Store, only using it to place virtual objects/furniture around your actual room.

Stolen from the win10 thread:

Aaaah, I need more impressions!

 

[statham]

Stolen from the win10 thread:

I wanna try it, sounds awesome.

 

[Bill Rizer]

Would be cool for placing huds outside the actual tv screen for practical hudless gaming.

 

[Loofy]

I think old people in nursing homes would love this too.

 

[Baroquemantic]

Seems pretty cool. Looks just like AR though. I wonder how much this will cost.

 

[VlaudTheImpaler]

now this is a LIE lol

Oh look, more bullshit from the Microsoft Research labs that appears in cool vids but ultimately never goes anywhere.

How much have they spent on a video just to say 'hey if we could do holograms someday couldnt that be cool'

Too bad we'll never see anything like this.

Haha wow. I'm calling bullshit on this one

Another Microsoft BS video I'm guessing.

If only this stuff was right around the corner...

Holograms? Cool, but we are way way way far off from that level of fidelity. Plus, haptic feedback for AR isn't even a thing yet, making working with them within a real 3D space isn't even a thing yet.

Urgh, there's no way all that crap is going to be computed and rendered in 3d on a pair of glasses, that shit is so misleading.

That is never going to work in the next years like shown.

No chance the hologram stuff shown in the video is ready any time soon. It looks so far off.

This hologram segment is specifically made for clueless journalists who have no idea what it takes to make this work.

The amount of straight up bullshit in this segment is astounding.

So much BS. Easy to make a futuristic video about AR, the practicality of it is a completely different matter.

This just isn't happening. BS.

No PC connection needed.

lol ok

this whole thing sounds like a lie and seems like a bad idea

imagine just walking with this


how expensive is this promise?

What was actually happening...

Spoiler

So salty

 

[justsomeguy]

Aaaah, I need more impressions!

Sorry, I'm rubbish at impressions

 

[cyberheater]

Stolen from the win10 thread:

Awesome. That's what I wanted to hear.

 

[justsomeguy]

What was actually happening...

Spoiler

So salty

Amazing.

 

[Shpeshal Nick]

Like Kinect before release, looks cool if it works.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

I think this is why MS bought MineCraft.



You're on a roll tonight.

You sound like you have a very interesting application in mind. Care to share?

I'm just trying to figure out what's actually going on in these demos on a technical level. They keep throwing around terms that make me suspect they've done a fair amount of work into actually connecting the virtual and the physical world, on a basic software level.

This definitely resonates strongly with me as I've been fascinated by such problems since I was a child. The involvement of Minecraft also makes a lot of sense once you look at it from an interface oriented point of view. The importance of Minecraft is that it launched a (hugely popular) platform with a very simple homogeneous interface that can represent interaction with a 3D environment in the general sense. Even though the interaction is very crude and simplistic, it's also quite robust in the sense that many different kinds of content can be represented with it. Which is why we've seen everything from 1:1 replicas of the Enterprise to huge organic looking structures etc. The fact that it is both extremely popular as well as robust and possible to iterate on makes it a very good candidate for a basis for future standard AR interfaces, in the same way the mouse and cursor were an important basis for graphical interfaces.

 

[DopeyFish]

‏@MattRosoff 1m1 minute ago

I've now had my mind blown twice in two months -- Oculus, and HoloLens. Hands-on impressions coming soon.

 

[autoduelist]

Looks like it could be cool, but I'm a bit bothered that they'd muddy the waters by calling it 'holo' for PR reasons when it's AR. Very different techs, it's just that 'holo' sounds cooler... but it's misleading for people that actually care.

There are a ton of hurdles for this to overcome that I doubt Gen 1 will deal with... the example of minecraft on the couch/table, for example, will likely have huge floating/clipping issues in early years of the tech. Pure floating displays with no attachment to physical objects seems more realistic during the tech's infancy.

 

[Betta Lines]

Like Kinect before release, looks cool if it works.

Kinect looked broken from the moment it was given a live demo. The HoloLens live demo was pretty much flawless. Suspiciously so, but going by the initial impressions from journalists, I shall give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[foolishoptimist]

For a wired article, that was extremely lacking in any technical detail. I'm getting Natal Hyperbole warnings.

Waiting for regular people's impressions, and some actual specs.

 

[jbug617]

More reactions

@nickwingfield: Just played Minecraft using Microsoft HoloLens and can confirm that it in fact works and is pretty sweet. Blew a hole in a room wall w/TNT.

 

[maquiladora]

Skeptical, but I'm glad we are progressing in the VR/AR department. Exciting times ahead.

 

[Rogue_Ledr]

Meh!

This isn't full fledged VR.

Just some substitute.

I don't want half assed VR, I want the whole thing.

 

[samn]

What was actually happening...

Spoiler

So salty

Except it's not a hologram, it's just glasses with a projector and a camera. We've seen AR stuff like this before, just not integrated as well. Even so you'll be wearing stupid glasses which are unbearable enough in the movie theatre.

They showed off an undoable concept in their video then they showed something that pretended to be that concept.

 

[Quazar]

Finally MS. hyped x 1000

 

[cyberheater]

I'm just trying to figure out what's actually going on in these demos on a technical level. They keep throwing around terms that make me suspect they've done a fair amount of work into actually connecting the virtual and the physical world, on a basic software level.

This definitely resonates strongly with me as I've been fascinated by such problems since I was a child. The involvement of Minecraft also makes a lot of sense once you look at it from an interface oriented point of view. The importance of Minecraft is that it launched a (hugely popular) platform with a very simple homogeneous interface that can represent interaction with a 3D environment in the general sense. Even though the interaction is very crude and simplistic, it's also quite robust in the sense that many different kinds of content can be represented with it. Which is why we've seen everything from 1:1 replicas of the Enterprise to huge organic looking structures etc. The fact that it is both extremely popular as well as robust and possible to iterate on makes it a very good candidate for a basis for future standard AR interfaces, in the same way the mouse and cursor were an important basis for graphical interfaces.

As I walk down the street I can see the neon strip overlaid on the pavement telling me the way. I change my mind and ask Cortana to take me to HMV instead. I wonder in. Pickup a CD. My HoloLens scans the barcode and projects the 5 cheapest places online where I can buy it. I instruct Cortana to purchase it from Amazon and put the CD down.

That's the reality on offer here. I'm in.

 

[tuxfool]

Except it's not a hologram, it's just glasses with a projector and a camera. We've seen AR stuff like this before, just not integrated as well. Even so you'll be wearing stupid glasses which are unbearable enough in the movie theatre.

They showed off an undoable concept in their video then they showed something that pretended to be that concept.

This. I think people would be much more willing to buy into the concept:

1) had they not tried to deceive people with this Hologram nonsense.

2) not released that BS video, completely misrepresenting the product as it stands currently.

This is the kind of thing Oculus and Sony and just about everyone else was saying about being cautious with expectations and promotion of the ideas behind their tech. They would have been fine with just that live demo...

 

[DopeyFish]

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7867841/take-two-rockstar-hololens-gta-5

get hype

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Meh!

This isn't full fledged VR.

Just some substitute.

I don't want half assed VR, I want the whole thing.

You're not going to get full fledged VR as long as the problem of recreating physical feedback isn't solved. And that's going to take a while.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

What was actually happening...

Spoiler

So salty

You think so? I can't think of an example where Microsoft has delivered on their pie-in-the-sky concept videos. I may just have selective memory, though.

 

[Betta Lines]

Meh!

This isn't full fledged VR.

Just some substitute.

I don't want half assed VR, I want the whole thing.

It's not a substitute, it's AR - a different thing. It has pros and cons just like VR. Eventually they may come together, but that doesn't make sense at the moment.

 

[Anton Sugar]

Meh!

This isn't full fledged VR.

Just some substitute.

I don't want half assed VR, I want the whole thing.

VR =/= AR

 

[Darknight]

This looks pretty neat. Will keep my eyes on it for sure.

 

[jem0208]

Meh!

This isn't full fledged VR.

Just some substitute.

I don't want half assed VR, I want the whole thing.

This isn't meant to be VR. This is a whole different thing, and IMO far more interesting.

 

[VinFTW]

A pokemon game with Hololens...

gasm.

This looks pretty neat. Will keep my eyes on it for sure.

Porter robinson fan?

Unless your avatar is something else, in that case, my b.

 

[Lazlo]

Except it's not a hologram, it's just glasses with a projector and a camera. We've seen AR stuff like this before, just not integrated as well. Even so you'll be wearing stupid glasses which are unbearable enough in the movie theatre.

They showed off an undoable concept in their video then they showed something that pretended to be that concept.

There's no projector in this device

 

[cyberheater]

Except it's not a hologram, it's just glasses with a projector and a camera. We've seen AR stuff like this before, just not integrated as well. Even so you'll be wearing stupid glasses which are unbearable enough in the movie theatre.

They showed off an undoable concept in their video then they showed something that pretended to be that concept.

If you are wearing something such that it looks like there is a solid 3 dimension persistent object sitting in front of you and you could get up and move around it and it still stays there then what would you call it?

The fact that we haven't got words in our vocabulary is the issue. A hologram is a pretty good word to convey to people what this thing is about.

 

[AmyS]

Something like how this 1980s commercial presents 3D will be rather trivial for HoloLens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh7mjfJZHPo

 

[DopeyFish]

@NateRalph

"Welcome back to earth" is the saddest thing I've heard today. I was hoping to chill on Mars with Microsoft's HoloLens prototype foreverish

this is from CNET

CNET

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

As I walk down the street I can see the neon strip overlaid on the pavement telling me the way. I change my mind and ask Cortana to take me to HMV instead. I wonder in. Pickup a CD. My HoloLens scans the barcode and projects the 5 cheapest places online where I can buy it. I instruct Cortana to purchase it from Amazon and put the CD down.

That's the reality on offer here. I'm in.

Taking it a step further, just to be clear. The physical CD you held in the store doesn't need to be something you actually walk out of the store with once you've made your purchase.
You purchase digital data. Back at home you may have a shelf which appears to have hundreds of individual boxes with CDs of your favorite music and movies, or a bookshelf that appears to have thousands of physical hardcover books. But in fact you only need to have 3-5 physical objects that are blank slates and have the shape of a CD or a book etc.

Most of the time when we actually want to touch something and handle it with our own two hands, we're only touching a very small part of it at any given moment. The rest is scenery interpreted by our eyes as identically tangible. That's why this illusion could work.

 

[bonercop]

Except it's not a hologram, it's just glasses with a projector and a camera. We've seen AR stuff like this before, just not integrated as well. Even so you'll be wearing stupid glasses which are unbearable enough in the movie theatre.

They showed off an undoable concept in their video then they showed something that pretended to be that concept.

describing something that tracks your gaze and directly sends images into your eyeballs as "just glasses with a projector" is a tad reductive.

 

[AmyS]

I'm interested in learning more about the HPU.

 

[tuxfool]

If you are wearing something such that it looks like there is a solid 3 dimension persistent object sitting in front of you and you could get up and move around it and it still stays there then what would you call it?

The fact that we haven't got words in our vocabulary is the issue. A hologram is a pretty good word to convey to people what this thing is about.

I'll point you towards this

 

[Lynn616]

GPS would work well as an app for this.

 

[Baroquemantic]

Watched the video, and yeah, this looks just like AR. Still pretty cool though. I kinda want one.